Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860




[Footnote e: _Odyssey_, xii., 4.]

But most certainly the Greeks gave a profound spiritual meaning to the
Eleusinia, as also to the mystic connection of Demeter with Dionysus.
She gave them bread: but they never forgot that she gave them the bread
of life. "She gave us," says the ancient Isocrates, "two gifts that are
the most excellent: fruits, that we might not live like beasts; and that
initiation, those who have part in which have sweeter hope,--both as
regards the close of life, and for all eternity." So Dionysus gave them
wine, not only to lighten the cares of life, but as a token, moreover,
of efficient deliverance from the fear of death, and of the higher joy
which he would give them in some happier world. And thus it is, that,
from the earliest times and in all the world, bread and wine have been
symbols of sacramental significance.

Human life so elevates all things with its exaltation and clothes them
with its glory, that nothing vain, nothing trifling, can be found within
its range. He who opposes himself to a single fact thus of necessity
opposes himself to the whole onward and upward current, and must fall.
We have heard of Thor, who with his magic mallet and his two celestial
comrades went to Joetunheim in quest of adventures: and we remember the
goblet which he could not exhaust because of its mysterious connection
with the inexhaustible Sea; the race with Hugi, which in the end proved
to be a race with Thought; and the wrestle with the old nurse Elli, who
was no other than Time herself, and therefore irresistible. So do we all
get us mallets ingeniously forged by the dark elves;--we try a race with
human thought, and look vainly to come out ahead; we laugh at things
because they are old, but with which we struggle to no purpose; and the
cup which we confidently put to our lips has no bottom;--in fact, the
great world of Joetunheim has grown for so long a time and so widely that
it is quite too much for us,--and its tall people, though we come down
upon them, like Thor and his companions, from celestial heights, are too
stout for our mallet.

Nothing human is so insignificant, but that, if you will give it time
and room, it will become irresistible. The plays of men become their
dramas; their holidays change to holy days. The representations, through
which, under various names, they have repeated to themselves the glory
and the tragedy of their life,--old festivals once celebrated in Egypt
far back beyond the dimmest myths of human remembrance,--the mystic
drama of the Eleusinia, which we have been considering in its
overwhelming sorrow developed in hurried flight, and its lofty
hope through triumphal pomp and the significant symbolism of
resurrection,--the epos and the epic rhapsodies,--the circus and
the amphitheatre,--and even the impetuous song and dance of painted
savages,--all these, which at first we may pass by with a glance, have
for our deeper search a meaning which we can never wholly exhaust. Let
it be that they have grown from feeble beginnings, they have grown to
gigantic dimensions; and not their infantile proportions, but their
fullest growth is to be taken as the measure of their strength,--if,
indeed, it be not wholly immeasurable.

Upon some day, seemingly by chance, but really having its antecedent
in the remotest antiquity, a company of men participate in some simple
act,--of sacrifice, it may be, or of amusement. Now that act will be
reiterated.

"Quod semel dictum est stabilisque rerum
Terminus servet."

The subtile law of repetition, as regards the human will, is as sure
in Determination as it is in Consciousness. Habit is as inevitable as
Memory; and as nothing can be forgotten, but, when once known, is
known forever,--so nothing is done but will be done again. Lethe and
Annihilation are only myths upon the earth, which men, though suspicious
of their eternal falsehood, name to themselves in moments of despair
and fearful apprehension. The poppy has only a fabled virtue; but, like
Persephone, we have all tasted of the pomegranate, and must ever to
Hades and back again; for while death and oblivion only seem to be,
remembrances and resurrections there must be, and without end. Therefore
this before-mentioned act of sacrifice or amusement will be reiterated
at given intervals; about it, as a centre, will be gathered all the
associations of intense interest in human life; and the names connected
with its origin--once human names upon the earth--will pass upon the
stars, so that the _nomina_ shall have changed to _numina_, and be
taken upon the lips with religious awe. So it was with these old
festivals,--so with all the representations of human life in stone or
upon the canvas, in the fairy-tale, the romance, and the poem; at every
successive repetition, at every fresh resurrection, is evolved by human
faith and sympathy a deeper significance, until they become the
centres of national thought and feeling, and men believe in them as in
revelations from heaven; and even the oracles themselves, in respect of
their inherent meaning, as also of their origin and authority, rise
by the same ascending series of repeated birth,--like that at Delphi,
which, at first attributed to the Earth, then to Themis, daughter of
Earth and Heaven, was at last connected with the Sun and constituted one
of the richest gems in Apollo's diadem of light.

In the end we shall find that the whole world organizes about its centre
of Faith. Thus, under three different religious systems, Jerusalem,
Delphi, and Mecca were held to be each in its turn the _omphalos_ or
navel of the world. It follows inevitably that the _main_ movement of
the world must always be joyous and hopeful. By reason of this joy it is
that every religious system has its feast; and the sixth day--the day
of Iacchus--is the great day of the festival. The inscription which
rises above every other is "To the Saviour Gods."

We must look at history as a succession of triumphs from the beginning;
and each trophy that is erected outdoes in its magnificence all that
were ever erected before it. Nothing has suffered defeat, except as it
has run counter to the main movement of conquest. No system of faith,
therefore, can by any possibility pass away. Involved it may be in some
fuller system; its _material_ bases may be modified; its central source
become more central in the human heart, and so stronger in the world and
more immediate in its connection with the eternal; but the life itself
of the system must live forever and grow forever.

Still it is true that in the widest growth there is the largest
liability to weakness. "Thus it is," says Fouque, "with poor, though
richly endowed man. All lies within his power so long as action is at
rest within him; nothing is in his power the moment action has displayed
itself, even by the lifting-up of a finger on the immeasurable world."
In the very extent of the empire of an Alexander, a Caesar, or a
Tamerlane, rests the possibility of its rapid dissolution. At the
giddiest altitude of triumph it is that the brain grows dizziest
and there is revealed the deepest chasm of possible defeat; and the
conqueror,

"Having his ear full of his airy fame,"

is just then most likely to fall like Herod from his aerial pomp to the
very dust. This consciousness, revealing at the highest moment of joy
its utmost frailty, led the ancients to suspect the presence of some Ate
or Nemesis in all human triumphs. We all remember the king who threw his
signet-ring into the sea, that he might in his too happy fortunes avert
this suspected presence; we remember, too, the apprehension of the
Chorus in the "Seven against Thebes," looking forward from the noontide
prosperity of the Theban king to some coming catastrophe.

But it is not without us that this Nemesis waits; she is but another
name for the fearful possibility which lurks in every human will, of
treachery to itself. And as solemnity rises to its acme in the most
sensuous manifestation of the glory of life,--so in all that most
fascinates and bewilders, at the very crisis of victorious exaltation,
at the very height of joyous sensibility, does this mysterious power
of temptation reveal her subtlest treachery; and sometimes in a single
moment does she change the golden-filleted Horae, that are our ministers,
into frightful furies, which drive us back again from triumph into
flight.

What was it, then, which saved the Eleusinia from this defeat,--which
kept the movement of the Dionysiac procession from the ruin inevitably
consequent upon all intemperate joy? It was the presence of our Lady,
the sorrowing Achtheia, who was the inseparable companion of the joyous
conqueror,--who subdued the joy of victory, and preserved the strength
and holy purity of the great Festival. Demeter was thus necessary to
Dionysus,--as Dionysus to Demeter; and if in remembrance of him the
sepulchral walls were covered with scenes associated with festivity,--in
remembrance of her there must needs be a skeleton at every feast.

How inseparably connected in human thought is sorrow with all permanent
hope is indicated in the penances which men have imposed upon
themselves, from the earliest Gymnosophists of India, and the Stylitae of
Syria, down to the monastic orders of the Romish Church in later times.
This is the meaning of the old Indian fable which made two of the
_Rishis_ or penitents to have risen by the discipline of sorrow from
some low caste,--it may be, from very Pariahs,--first to the rank of
Brahmins, and at last to the stars. The first initiation in which we
veil our eyes, losing all, is essential to our fresher birth, by
which in the second initiation all things are unveiled to us as our
inheritance: indeed, it is only through that which veils that anything
is ever revealed or possessed.

Through the same gate we pass both to glory and to tragic suffering,
each of which heightens and measures the other; and it is only so that
we can understand the function of sorrow in the Providence of God, or
interpret the sudden calamities which sometimes overwhelm human hopes at
their highest aspiration,--which from the most serene and cloudless sky
evoke storms which leave not even a wreck from their vast ruin.

Nor merely is sorrow efficient in those who hope, but in even a higher
sense does it attach to the character of Saviour. Apollo is, therefore,
fabled to have been an exile from heaven and a servant of Admetus;
indeed, Danaues, in "The Suppliants" of AEschylus, appeals to Apollo for
protection on this very plea, addressing him as "the Holy One, and
an exiled God from heaven." Thus Hercules was compelled to serve
Eurystheus; and his twelve labors were typed in the twelve signs of the
zodiac. AEsculapius and Prometheus both suffered excruciating tortures
and death for the good of men. And Dionysus--himself the centre of all
joy--was persecuted by the Queen of Heaven and compelled to wander in
the world. Thus he wandered through Egypt, finding no abiding-place, and
finally, as the story runs, came to the Phrygian Cybele, that he might
know in their deepest meaning--even by the initiation of sorrow--the
mysteries of the Great Mother. And, very significantly, it is from this
same initiation that _His_ wanderings have their end and his world-wide
conquest its beginning; as if only thus could be realized the
possibility both of triumph for himself and of hope for his followers.
For these wanderers can find rest only in a _suffering_ Saviour, by the
vision of whose deeper Passion they lose their sense of grief,--as Io on
Caucasus in sight of the transfixed Prometheus, and the Madonna at the
Cross.

It is worthy of more attention than we can give it here, yet we cannot
pass over in silence the fact, so important in this relation, that
Grecian Tragedy, in all its wonderful development under the three great
masters, was directly associated, and in its ruder beginnings completely
identified, with the worship of Dionysus. And this confirms our previous
hint, that the same element which made tragedy possible for Greece must
also be sought for in the development of its faith. There are those who
decry Grecian faith,--at the same time that they laud the Grecian drama
to the skies: but to the Greeks themselves, who certainly knew more than
we do as regards either, the drama was only an outgrowth of their faith,
and derived thence its highest significance. Thus the mystic symbolism
of the dramatic Choruses, taken out of its religious connections,
becomes an insoluble enigma; and naturally enough; for its first use
was in religious worship,--though afterwards it became associated with
traditionary and historic events. Besides, it was supposed that the
tragedians wrote under a divine inspiration; and the subjects and
representations which they embodied were for the most part susceptible
of a deep spiritual interpretation. Indeed, upon a careful examination,
we shall find that very many of the dramas directly suggest the two
Eleusinian movements, representing first the flight of suppliants--as
of the Heraclidae, the daughters of Danaues, and of Oedipus and
Antigone--from persecution to the shrine of some Saviour Deity,--and
finally a deliverance effected through sacrifice or divine
interposition. Examples of this are so numerous that we have no space
for a minute consideration.

But certainly it is plain that the Eleusinia, as being more central,
more purely spiritual, must in the thought of Greece have risen high
above the drama. The very dress in which the _mystae_ were initiated was
preserved as most sacred or deposited in the temple. Or if we insist
upon measuring their appreciation of the Festival by the more palpable
standard of numbers,--the temple at Eleusis, by the account of Strabo,
was capable of holding even in its mystic cell more persons than the
theatre. To be sure, the celebration was only once in five years,--but
it was all the more sacred from this very infrequency. Nothing in all
Greece--and that is saying very much--could compare with it in its depth
of divine mystery. If anything could, it would have been the drama; but
no wailings were ever heard from beneath the masks of the stage like the
wailings of Achtheia,--no jubilant song of the Chorus ever rose like the
paean of Dionysiac triumph.

* * * * *

Thus was the name of Dionysus connected with the palace and the temple,
with the sepulchral court of death and the dramatic representations of
life,--and everywhere associated with our Lady.

Sometimes, indeed, she seems to overshadow and hide him from our vision.
Thus was it when the Eumenides in their final triumph swept the stage,
and victory seemed all in the hands of invisible Powers, with no
human participant: even as throughout the Homeric epos there runs an
undercurrent of unutterable sadness; because, while to the Gods there
ever remains a sure seat upon Olympus, unshaken by the winds, untouched
by rain or snow, crowned with a cloudless radiance,--yet upon man
come vanity, sorrow, and strife; like the leaves of the forest he
flourisheth, and then passeth away to the "weak heads of the dead,"
([Greek: nekuon amenaena karaena],) conquered by purple Death and strong
Fate.

To the eye of sense, and in the circumscribed movements of this world,
the desolation seems complete and the defeat final. But the snows of
winter are necessary to the blossoms of spring,--the waste of death to
the resurrection of life; and from the vastest of all desolations does
our Lady lead her children in the loftiest of all flights,--even from
all sorrow and solitude,--from the wastes of earth and the desolation of
AEons, to ineffable joy in her Saviour Lord.

* * * * *



VICTOR AND JACQUELINE.

I.


Jacqueline Gabrie and Elsie Meril could not occupy one room, and remain,
either of them, indifferent to so much as might be manifested of the
other's inmost life. They could not emigrate together, peasants from
Domremy,--Jacqueline so strong, Elsie so fair,--could not labor in the
same harvest-fields, children of old neighbors, without each being
concerned in the welfare and affected by the circumstances of the other.

It was near ten o'clock, one evening, when Elsie Meril ran up the
common stairway, and entered the room in the fourth story where she and
Jacqueline lodged.

Victor Le Roy, student from Picardy, occupied the room next theirs, and
was startled from his slumber by the voices of the girls. Elsie was
fresh from the theatre, from the first play she had ever witnessed; she
came home excited and delighted, ready to repeat and recite, as long as
Jacqueline would listen.

And here was Jacqueline.

Early in the evening Elsie had sought her friend with a good deal of
anxiety. A fellow-lodger and field-laborer had invited her to see the
play,--and Jacqueline was far down the street, nursing old Antonine
Dupre. To seek her, thus occupied, on such an errand, Elsie had the good
taste, and the selfishness, to refrain from doing.

Therefore, after a little deliberation, she had gone to the theatre, and
there forgot her hard day-labor in the wonders of the stage,--forgot
Jacqueline, and Antonine, and every care and duty. It was hard for her,
when all was ended, to come back to compunction and explanation, yet to
this she had come back.

Neither of the girls was thinking of the student, their neighbor; but
he was not only wakened by their voices, he amused himself by comparing
them and their utterances with his preconceived notions of the girls.
They might not have recognized him in the street, though they had often
passed him on the stairs; but he certainly could have distinguished the
pretty face of Elsie, or the strange face of Jacqueline, wherever he
might meet them.

Elsie ran on with her story, not careful to inquire into the mood of
Jacqueline,--suspicious of that mood, no doubt,--but at last, made
breathless by her haste and agitation, she paused, looked anxiously at
Jacqueline, and finally said,--

"You think I ought not to have gone?"

"Oh, no,--it gave you pleasure."

A pause followed. It was broken at length by Elsie, exclaiming, in a
voice changed from its former speaking,--

"Jacqueline Gabrie, you are homesick! horribly homesick, Jacqueline!"

"You do not ask for Antonine: yet you know I went to spend the day with
her," said Jacqueline, very gravely.

"How is Antonine Dupre?" asked Elsie.

"She is dead. I have told you a good many times that she must die. Now,
she is dead."

"Dead?" repeated Elsie.

"You care as much as if a candle had gone out," said Jacqueline.

"She was as much to me as I to her," was the quick answer. "She never
liked me. She did not like my mother before me. When you told her my
name, the day we saw her first, I knew what she thought. So let that go.
If I could have done her good, though, I would, Jacqueline."

"She has everything she needs,--a great deal more than we have. She is
very happy, Elsie."

"Am not I? Are not you, in spite of your dreadful look? Your look is
more terrible than the lady's in the play, just before she killed
herself. Is that because Antonine is so well off?"

"I wish that I could be where she is," sighed Jacqueline.

"You? You are tired, Jacqueline. You look ill. You will not be fit for
to-morrow. Come to bed. It is late."

As Jacqueline made no reply to this suggestion, Elsie began to reflect
upon her words, and to consider wherefore and to whom she had spoken.
Not quite satisfied with herself could she have been, for at length she
said in quite another manner,--

"You always said, till now, you wished that you might live a hundred
years. But it was not because you were afraid to die, you said so,
Jacqueline."

"I don't know," was the answer,--sadly spoken, "Don't remind me of
things I have said. I seem to have lost myself."

The voice and the words were effectual, if they were intended as an
appeal to Elsie. Fain would she now exclude the stage and the play from
her thoughts,--fain think and feel with Jacqueline, as it had long been
her habit to do.

Jacqueline, however, was not eager to speak. And Elsie must draw yet
nearer to her, and make her nearness felt, ere she could hope to receive
the thought of her friend. By-and-by these words were uttered, solemn,
slow, and dirge-like:--

"Antonine died just after sundown. I was alone with her. She did not
think that she would die so soon. I did not. In the morning, John
Leclerc came in to inquire how she spent the night. He prayed with her.
And a hymn,--he read a hymn that she seemed to know, for all day she was
humming it over. I can say some of the lines."

"Say them, Jacqueline," said the softened voice of Elsie.

Slowly, and as one recalls that of which he is uncertain, Jacqueline
repeated what I copy more entire:--

"In the midst of life, behold,
Death hath girt us round!
Whom for help, then, shall we pray?
Where shall grace be found?
In thee, O Lord, alone!
We rue the evil we have done,
That thy wrath on us hath drawn.
Holy Lord and God!
Strong and holy God!
Merciful and holy Saviour!
Eternal God!
Sink us not beneath
Bitter pains of endless death!
Kyrie, eleison!"

"Then he went away," she continued. "But he did not think it was the
last time he should speak to Antonine. In the afternoon I thought I saw
a change, and I wanted to go for somebody. But she said, 'Stay with me.
I want nothing.' So I sat by her bed. At last she said, 'Come, Lord
Jesus! come quickly!' and she started up in her bed, as if she saw
him coming. And as if he were coming nearer, she smiled. That was the
last,--without a struggle, or as much as a groan."

"No priest there?" asked Elsie.

"No. When I spoke to her about it, she said her priest was Jesus Christ
the Righteous,--and there was no other,--the High-Priest. She gave me
her Bible. See how it has been used! 'Search the Scriptures,' she said.
She told me I was able to learn the truth. 'I loved your mother,' she
said; 'that is the reason I am so anxious you should know. It is by
my spirit, said the Lord. Ask for that spirit,' she said. 'He is more
willing to give than earthly parents are to give good gifts to their
children.' She said these things, Elsie. If they are true, they must be
better worth believing than all the riches of the world are worth the
having."

The interest manifested by the student in this conversation had been on
the increase since Jacqueline began to speak of Antonine Dupre. It was
not, at this point of the conversation, waning.

"Your mother would not have agreed with Antonine," said Elsie, as if
there were weight in the argument;--for such a girl as Jacqueline could
not speak earnestly in the hearing of a girl like Elsie without result,
and the result was at this time resistance.

"She believed what she was taught in Domremy," answered Jacqueline, "She
believed in Absolution, Extreme Unction, in the need of another priest
than Jesus Christ,--a representative they call it." She spoke slowly, as
if interrogating each point of her speech.

"I believe as they believed before us," answered Elsie, coldly.

"We have learned many things since we came to Meaux," answered
Jacqueline, with a patient gentleness, that indicated the perplexity
and doubt with which the generous spirit was departing from the old
dominion. She was indeed departing, with that reverence for the past
which is not incompatible with the highest hope for the future. "Our
Joan came from Domremy, where she must crown the king," she continued.
"We have much to learn."

"She lost her life," said Elsie, with vehemence.

"Yes, she did lose her life," Jacqueline quietly acquiesced.

"If she had known what must happen, would she have come?"

"Yes, she would have come."

"How late it is!" said Elsie, as if in sleep were certain rest from
these vexatious thoughts.

Victor Le Roy was by this time lost in his own reflections. These girls
had supplied an all-sufficient theme; whether they slept or wakened was
no affair of his. He had somewhat to argue for himself about extreme
unction, priestly intervention, confession, absolution,--something to
say to himself about Leclerc, and the departed Antonine.

Late into the night he sat thinking of the marvel of Domremy and
of Antonine Dupre, of Picardy and of Meaux, of priests and of the
High-Priest. Brave and aspiring, Victor Le Roy could not think of
these things, involved in the names of things above specified, as more
calculating, prudent spirits might have done. It was his business, as a
student, to ascertain what powers were working in the world. All true
characters, of past time or present, must be weighed and measured by
him. Result was what he aimed at.

Jacqueline's words had not given him new thoughts, but unawares they did
summon him to his appointed labor. He looked to find the truth. He must
stand to do his work. He must haste to make his choice. Enthusiastic,
chivalrous, and strong, he was seeking the divine right, night and
day,--and to ascertain that, as it seemed, he had come from Picardy to
Meaux.

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